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Cold War
The Cold War, often dated from 1947 to 1991, was the sustained state of political and military tension between the powers in the Western Bloc, dominated by the United States with NATO and other allies; versus the powers in the Eastern Bloc; dominated by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and its allies. This began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Germany, leaving the US and the USSR as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. A neutral faction arose with the Non-Aligned movement founded by Egypt, India, and Yugoslavia, this faction rejected association with either the US-led West or the USSR-led East. The Cold War was so named because the major powers--each possessing nuclear weapons and thereby threatened with Mutual assured destruction--did not meet in direct military combat. However, in their struggle for global influence they engaged in ongoing Psychological warfare and in regular indirect confrontations through Proxy wars. Cycles of relative calm would be folowed by high tension which could have led to war. The tensest times were during the Berlin Blockade (1948-1949), the Korean War (1950-1953), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Berlin Crisis (1961), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Vietnam War (1959-1975), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979-1989), the Soviet shootdown of KAL Flight 007 (1983), and the "Able Archer" NATO military exercises (1983). The conflict was expressed through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to client states, espionage, massive propaganda campaign, conventional and nuclear arms races, appeals to neutral nations, rivalry at sports events, technological competitions such as the Space Race. The US and the USSR became involved in political and military conflicts in the Third World countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. To alleviate the risk of potential nuclear war, both sides sought relief of political tensions through detente in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was already suffering from economic stagnation. In the mid-1980s, the new Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev introduced liberalizing reforms of Perestroika ("reconstruction", reorganization") and Glasnost ("openness") This opened the country and its satellite states to a mostly peaceful wave of revolutions (Revolutions of 1989) which culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power. The Cold War and its events have left a significant legacy, and is often referred to in popular culture, especially in media featuring themes of espionage and the threat of Nuclear warfare. Background There is disagreement among historians regarding the starting point of the Cold War. While most historians trace its origins to the period immediately following World War II, others argue that it began towards the end of World War I, although tensions between the Russian Eempire, other European countries and the United States date back to the middle of the 19th Century. As a result of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution throughout Russia (followed by its withdrawal from World War I), Soviet Russia found itself isolated in international dipolmacy. Leader Vladimir Lenin stated that the Soviet Union was surrounded by a "hostile Capitalist encirclement", and viewed diplomacy as a weapon to keep Soviet enemies divided, beginning with establishment of the Soviet Comintern, which called for revolutionary upheavals aborad. Subsequent leader Joseph Stalin, who viewed the Soviet Union as a "socialist island", stated that the Soviet Union must see that "the present Capitalist encirclement is replaced by a socialist encirclement." As early a 1925, Stalin stated that he viewed international politics as a bipolar world in which the Soviet Union would attract countries gravitating toward Socialism and capitalist countries would attract states gravitating towards Capitalism, while the world was in a period of "temporary stabilization of capitalism" preceding its eventual collapse. Various events that occured before the Second World War demonstrated the mutual distrust and suspicion between Western powers and the Soviet Union, apart from the general philosophical challenge the Bolsheviks made towards Capitalism. There was support of the anti-Bolshevik White movement in the Russian Civil War, the 1926 Soviet funding of a British general workers strike causing Britan to break off relations with the Soviet Union, Stalins 1927 declaration of peaceful coexsistance with capitalist countries "receding into the past," conspiratorial allegations of British, French, Japanese, Germam espionage. However, both the US and the USSR were generally isolationist between the two world wars. The Soviet Union initially signed a Non-aggression pact with Germany. But after the German Army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Soviet Union and the other Allied powers formed an alliance of convenience. Britan signed a formal alliance and the United States made an informal agreement. In wartime, the United States supplied both the UK and the USSR through the Lend-Lease program. However, Stalin remained highly suspicious and believed that the British and the Americans had conspired to ensure that the Soviets bore the brunt of the fighting against Germany. According to this view, the Western Allies had deliberately delayed opening a second anti-German front in order to step in at the last moment and shape the peace settlement. Thus, Soviet perceptions of the West left a strong undercurrent of tension between the Allied powers. End of World War II (1945-1947) The Allies disagreed about how the European map should look, and how the new borders would be drawn, following the war. each side held disimilar ideas regarding the establishment and maintenance of post-war security. The Western Allies desired a security system in in which democratic governments were established as widely as possible, permitting to peacefully resolve their differences through International organizations. Given the Russian historical experiences of frequent incursions from other countries, and with the immense civilian and military casualtie rates (estimated at 27 Million) and the destruction of infrastructure the Soviet Union sustained durring World War II, the Soviet Union sought to increase its security by dominating the internal affairs of countries that bordered it. During the war, Stalin had created special training centers for Communist from different countries so that they could set up secret police forces who would be loyal to Moscow as soon as the Red Army took control. Soviet agents took control of various forms of media, especially radio; they quickly harassed and banned all independent civic institutions, from youth groups to schools, churches and rival political parties. Stalin also sought continued peace with the United Kingdom and the United States, hoping to focus on internal reconstruction and economic growth. The Western Allies were devided in their vision of the new post-war world. President Franklin Roosevelt's goals - military victory in both Europe and Asia, the achievement of global American economic supremacy over the British Empire, and the creation of a world peace organization - were more global than Winston Churchill's, which were mainly centered on securing control over the Mediterranean Sea, ensuring the survival of the British Empire, and the independence of Eastern European countries as a "Buffer state" between the Soviets and the United Kingdom. In the American view, Stalin seemed as a potential ally in accomplishing their goals, whereas in the British approach Stalin appeared as the greatest threat to the fulfilment of their agenda. With the Soviets already occupying most of Eastern Europe, Stalin was at an advantage and the two western leaders vied for his favors. The differences between Roosevelt and Churchill led to several seperate deals with the Soviets. In October 1944, Churchill traveled to Moscow and agreed to devide the Balkans into respective spheres of influence, and at the Yalta conference Roosevelt signed a seperate deal with Stalin in regard of Asia and refused to support Churchill on the issues of Poland and reparations. Further Allied negotiations concerning the post-war ballance took place at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, albeit this conference also failed to reach a firm consensus on the framework for a post-war settlement in europe. In April 1945, President Roosevelt had died and was succeded Harry S. Truman, a staunch anti-communist who relied on advice from an elite group of foreign policy intellectuals. Both Churchill and Truman opposed, among other things, the Soviets decision prop up Lublin government, the Soviet-controlled rival of the Polish government-in-exile, whose relations with the Soviets were severe. Following the Allies May' 1945 victory, the Soviets effectively occupied Eastern Europe, while strong US and Western allied forces remained in Western Europe. In Allied-occupied Germany, the Soviet Union, United States, United Kingdom, and France established their zones of occupation (Soviet held Northeast, British held Northwest, American held Southwest and Southeast, and French held Far-Southwest) and loose framework for parceled four-power control. The 1945 Allied conference in San Francisco established the muti-national United Nations (UN) for maintenance of world peace, but the enforcement capacity of its Security Council was effectively paralyzed by individual members ability to use Veto power. Accordingly, the UN was essentially converted into an inactive form for exchanging polemical rhetoric, and the Soviets regarded it almost exclusively as a propaganda tribune. At the Potsdam Conference, which started in late July after Germany's surrender, serious differences emerged over the future development of Germany and Eastern Europe. Moreover, the participants mounting antipathy and bellicose language served to confirm their suspicions about each other's hostile intentions and entrenched their positions. At this conference Truman informed Stalin that the United States possessed a powerful new weapon. Stalin was aware that the Americans were working on the Atomic bomb and, given that the Soviets own rival program was in place, he reacted to the news calmly. The Soviet leader said he was pleased by the news and expressed the hope that the weapon would be used against Japan. One week after the end of the Potsdam Conference, the US ahd bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shortly after the attacks, Stalin protested to US officials when Truman offered the Soviets little real influcence in Allied-occupied Japan. Durring the opening stages of World War II, the Soviet Union laid the foundation for the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries as "Soviet Socialist Republics" that were initially (and effectively) ceded to it by Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. These included Eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs), Latvia (which became the Latvian SSR), Lithuania (becoming the Lithuanian SSR), part of Eastern Finland (becoming the Karelo-Finnish SSR), and Eastern Romania (becoming the Moldavian SSR). The Easten European territories liberated from Germany and occupied by Soviet forces were added to the Easten Bloc by converting them into Satellite states, Such as East Germany (GDR), the People's Republic of Poland (PRL), the Peole's Republic of Bulgaria, the People's Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People's Republic of Romania, and the People's Republic of Albania. The Soviet-style regimes that arose in the Bloc not only reproduced Soviet command economies, but also adopted the brutal methods employed by Stalin and Soviet secret police to suppress real and potential opposition. In Asia, the Red Army had overrun Machuria in the final month of the war, and went on to occupy the large swathe of Korean territory located north of the 38th Parallel. As part of consolodating Stalin's control over the Eastern Bloc, the NKVD, led by Lavrentiy Beria, supervised the establishment of Soviet-style secret police systems in the Bloc that were supposed to crush anti-communist resistance. When the slightest stirrings of independence emerged in the Bloc, Stalin's stradegy matched that of dealing with domestic pre-war rivals: they were removed from power, put on trial, imprisoned, and in several instances, executed. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was concerned tat, given the enormous size of Soviet foces deployed in Europe at the end of the war, and the preception that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was unreliable, there exsisted a Soviet threat to Western Europe. In April and May 1945, the British War Cabinet's Joint Planning Staff Committee developed "Operation Unthinkable", a plan "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the United Kingdom". The plan, however, was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee as militarily unfeasible. In February 1946, George F. Kennan's "long Telegram" from Moscow helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard lined stance against the Soviets, and became the basis for US stradegy toward the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. That September, the soviet side produced the "Novikov Telegram", sent by the Sovier ambassador to the US but commisioned and "co-authored" by Vyacheslav Molotov; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalist who were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in a new war". On September 6, 1946, James F. Byrnes delivered a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan (a proposal to de-industrialize post-war Germany) and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes admitted a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people. It was now a battle between us and Russia over minds." A few weeks after the release of this "long Telegram", former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri. The speech called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "Iron Curtain" from Szczecin (Stettin) in the Baltic Sea to Triest (Trieste) in the Adriatic Sea. Beginnings of The Cold War (1947-1953) In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform, the purpose of which was to enforce orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over its satellite states through coordination of communist parties in the Eastern Bloc. Cominform faced an embarrasing setback the following June, when the "Tito-Stalin split" obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained Communist but adopted a non-alligned position. By 1947, US President Harry S. Truman's advisors urged him to take immediate steps to counter the Soviet Union's influence, citing Stalin's efforts (amid post-war confusion and collapse) to undermind the US by encouraging rivalries among capitalist that could precipitate another war. In February 1947, the British goverment announced that it could no longer to finance the Greek monarchical military regime in its Civil War against communist led insurgents. The American government's response to this announcement was the addoption of containment, the goal of which was to stop the spread of communism. Truman delivered a speech that called for allocation of $400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine, which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes. Even though the insurgents helped by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia, US policy makers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalist in an effort to expand Soviet influence. Enunciation of the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats focused on containment and deterrence that weakened durring and after Vietnam War, but ultimately persisted thereafter. Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance, while European and American Communist paid by the KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of consensus politics came from anti-Vietnam War activist, the CND and nuclear freeze movement. In early 1947, Britan, France, and the United States unsuccessfully attempted to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for a plan envisioning an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets. In June 1947, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine, the United States enacted the Marshall Plan, a plege of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate, including the Soviet Union. The plan's aim was to rebuild the democratic and economic systems of Europe and to counter the perceived threats to Europe's balance of power, such as communist parties seizing control through revolutions and elections. The plan also stated that European prosperity was contingent upon German economic recovery. One month later, Truman signed the "National Security Act of 1947", creating a unified Department of Defense (DOD), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council (NSC). These would become the main bureaucracies for US policy in the Cold War. Stalin believed that economic integration with the west would allow Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet control, and that the US was trying to buy a pro-US re-alignment of Europe. Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid. The Soviet Union's alternative to the Marshall Plan, which was purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with eastern Europe, became known as the Molotov Plan (later institutionalized in January 1949 as the Comecon). Stalin was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany; his vision of a post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm or pose any kind of future threat to the Soviet Union. In early 1948, following reports of strengthening "reactionary elements", Soviet operatives executed a coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia, the only Eastern Bloc state that the Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures. The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any other event up to that point, set in motion a brief scare that war would occur and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress. The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid for Western Europe, Greece, and Turkey. With US assistance, the Greek military won its Civil War. The Italian Christian Democrats defeated the the powerful Communist-Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948. At the same time there was increased intelligence and espionage activity, Eastern Bloc defections and diplomatic expulsions. The United States and Britan merged their west German occupation zones into "Bizonia" (January 1, 1947, later "Trizonia" with the addition of French zone, April 1949). as part of the economic rebuilding of Germany, in early 1948, representatives from a number of Western European governments and the United States announced an agreement for a merger of western German areas into a federal governmental system. In addition, in accordance with the Marshall Plan, they began re-industrialize and rebuild the German economy, including the introduction of a new Deutsche Mark (German dollar bills and coins) to replace the old Reichsmark currency that the Soviets had debased. Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade (June 24, 1948 - May 12, 1949), one of the first major cisis of the Cold War, preventing food, materials and other important supplies from arriving into West Berlin. The United States, Britan, France, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland and several other countries began the massive "Berlin airlift", supplying West Berlin with food, water, and other provisions. The Soviets mounted a public relations campaign against the policy change. Once again the East Berlin communist attempted disrupt the Berlin municipal elections (as they had done in the 1946 elections), which were held on December 5, 1948 and produced a turnout of 86.3% and an overwhelming victory for the non-Communist parties. The results effectively divided the city into East and West versions of its former self. 300,000 Berliners demonstrated and urged the international airlift to continue, and US Air Force pilot Gail Halvorsen created "Operation Vittles", which supplied German children large ammounts of American and European made candy. In 1949, Stalin backed down and lifted the blockade. In 1952, Stalin repeatedly proposed a plan to unify East and West Germany under a single government chosen in elections supervised by the United Nations if the new Germany were to stay out of Western military alliances, but this proposal was turned down by the Western powers. Some sources dispute the sincerity of Stalins proposal. Britan, France, the United States, Canada, and eight other western European countries signed the "North Atlantic Treaty of 1949", establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That August, the first Soviet Atomic device was detonated in Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR. Following Soviet refusals to participate in a German rebuilding effort set fourth by western European countries in 1948, the US, Britan and France spearheaded the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from the three Western zones of occupation zones in April 1949. The Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the German Democratic Republic (GDR) that October. Media in the Eastern Bloc was an organ of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party, with radio and television organizations being state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist party. Soviet propaganda used Marxist philosophy to attack capitalism, claiming labor exploration and war-mongering imperialism were inherent in the system. Along with the broadcast of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Voice of America to Eastern Europe, a major propaganda effort begun in 1949 was Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, dedicated to bringing about the demise of the Communist system in the Eastern Bloc. Radio Free Europe attempted to achieve these goals by serving as a surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and party dominated domestic press. Radio Free Europe was a product of some of the most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially to those who believedthat the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan. American policy makers, including Kennan and John Foster Dulles, aknowleged that the Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas. the United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world. the CIA also covertly sponsored a domestic propaganda campaign called Crusade for Freedom. In the early 1950s, the US worked for rearmament of West Germany and, in 1955, secured its full membership of NATO. In May 1953, Beria, by then in a government post, had made an unsuccessful proposal to allow the reunification of neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's incorporation into NATO. In 1949, Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army defeated Chiang Kai-shek's United States-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Government in China, and the Soviet Union promptly created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic China. Chiang and his KMT government retreated to the island of Taiwan. Confronted with the communist revolution in China and the end of the American atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand the containment policy. In NSC-68, a secret 1950 document, the national Security Council proposed to reinforce pro-Western alliance systems and quadruple spending on defense. US officials moved thereafter to expand containment into Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in order to counter revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by communist parties financed by the USSR, fighting against the restoration of Europe's colonial empires in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. In the early 1950s (a period sometimes known as the "Pactomania"), the US formalized a series of alliances with Japan, Australia, New Zeeland, Thailand and the Philippines (notably ANZUS in 1951 and SEATO in 1954), thereby guaranteeing the United States a long-term number of military bases. One of the more significant impacts of containment was the outbreak of the Korean War. In 1950, Kim Il-Sung's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea. Joseph Stalin "planned, prepared, and initiated" the invasion, creating "detailed war plans" that were communicated to the North Koreans. To Stalin's surprise, the UN Security Council backed the defense of South Korea, the Soviets were then boycotting meetings in protest that Taiwan and not the Communist China held permanent seat on the Council. A UN force of personnel from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Canada, Australia, France, South Africa, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zeeland and other nations joined up to put a stop the invasion. Among other effects, the Korean War galvanised NATO to develope a military structure. Public opinion in countries involved, such as Great Britan, was divided for and against the war. Many feared an escalation into a general war with Communist China, and even nuclear war. The strong oppisition to the war often strained Anglo-American relations. For these reasons British officials sought a speedy end to the conflict, hoping to unite Korea under United Nations auspices and withdrawal of all foreign forces. Even though the Chinese and North Koreans were exsausted by the war and were prepared to end it by 1952, Stalin insisted that they continue fighting, and the Armistice was approved only in July 1953, after Stalin's death. North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung created a highly centralized and brutal dictatorship, according to himself unlimited power and generating a formidable Cult of personality. In the South, the corrupt American-backed strongman Syngman Rhee pursued a comparable system of totalitarian rule. After Rhee was overthrown in 1960, South Korea fell under a period of military rule that lasted until the re-establishment of a multi-party system in 1987. Crisis and escalation (1953-1962) In 1953, changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamics of the Cold War. Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated as president that January. During the last 18 months of the Truman administration, the American defense budget had quadrupled, and Eisenhower moved to reduce military spending by a third while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively. After the death of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev became the new Soviet premier following the deposition and execution of Lavrentiy Beria and the pushing aside of rivals Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov. On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev shocked delegates to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party by cataloguing and denouncing Stalin's crimes. As part of campaign of De-Stalinization, he declared that the only way to reform and move away from Stalin's policies would be to acknowlege errors made in the past. On November 18, 1956, while addressing Western ambassadors at a receptionat the Polish embassy in Moscow, Khrushchev used his famous "Wether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you" expression, shocking everyone present. He later claimed that he had not been talking about nuclear war, but rather about the historically determined victory of communisum over capitalism. In 1961, Khrushchev declared that even if the USSR was behind the West, within a decade its housing shortage would dissapear, consumer goods would be abundant, and within two decades, the "construction of a communist society" in the USSR would be comleted "in the main" Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, initiated a "New Look" for the containment strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons against US enemies in wartime. Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "massive retaliation", threatening the a sever US response to any Soviet agression. Possessing nuclear superiority, for example, allowed Eisenhower to face down Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East during the 1956 Suez Crisis. While Stalin's death in 1953 slightly relaxed tensions, the situation in Europe remained an uneasy truce. The Soviets, who had already created a network of mutual assistance treaties in the Eastern Bloc by 1949, established a formal alliance therein, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 occurred shortly after Khrushchev arranged the removal of Hungary's Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi. In response to a popular uprising, the new regime formally disbanded the secret police, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and pleged to re-establish free elections. The Soviet army invaded. Thousands of Hungarians were arrested, imprisoned, and deported to the Soviet Union, and approximately 200,000 Hungarians fled Hungary in the chaos. Hungarian leader Imre Nagy and others were executed following secret trials. From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly and repeatedly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. He claimed that Soviet missile capabilities were far superior to those of the United States, capable of wiping out any American or European city. However, Khrushchev rejected Stalin's belief in the inevitable of war, and declared his new goal was to be "peaceful coexistance". This formulation modified the Stalin-era Soviet stance, where international class struggle meant the two opposing camps were on a inevitable collision course where communism would triumph through global war; now, peace would allow capitalism to collapse on its own, as well as giving the Soviets time to boost their military capabilities, which remained for decades until Gorbachev's later "new thinking" envisioning peaceful coexsistance as an end in itself rather than a form of class stuggle. The events in Hungary produced ideological fractures within the Communist parties of the world, particularly in Western Europe, with great decline in membership as many in both western and communist countries felt disillusioned by the brutal Soviet response. The communist parties in the West would never recover from the effect the Hungarian Revolution had on their membership, a fact that was immediately recognized by some, such as the Yugoslavian politician Milovan Djilas who shortly after the revolution was crushed said that "The wound which the Hungarian Revolution inflicted on communism can never be healed". America's pronouncements concentrated on American strength abroad and the success of liberal capitalism. However, by the late 1960s, the "battle for the men's minds" between two systems of social organization that Kennedy spoke of in 1961 was largely over, with tensions henceforth based primarily on clashing geopolitical objectives than ideology. During November 1958, Khrushchev made an usuccessful attempt to turn all of Berlin into an independent, demilitarized "free city", giving the United States, Grest Britan, and France a six month ultimatum to withdraw their troops from the sectors they still occupied in West Berlin, or he would transfer control of Western access rights to East Germans. Khrushchev earlier explanied to Mao Zedong (in colorful detail how "If i ever want to make the west sream, I squeeze on Berlin.") NATO formally rejected the ultimatum in mid December and Khrushchev withdrew it in return for a Geneva conference on the German question. More broadly, one hallmark of the 1950s was the beginning of European integration -- a fundemental by-product of the Cold War that Truman and Eisenhower promoted politically, economically, and militarily but which later administrations viewed ambivalently, fearful that an independent Europe would forge a seperate detente with the Soviet Union, which would use this to exacerbate Western disunity. Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably Guatemala, Indonesia and Indochina were often allied with communist groups, or perceived in the West to be allied with communist. In this context, the United States and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s; additionally, the Soviets saw continuing losses by imerial powers as presaging the eventual victory of their ideology. Both sides were selling armaments to gain influence. The United States made use of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to do away with a string of unfriendly Third World governments and to support allied ones. In 1953, President Eisenhower's CIA implemented "Operation Ajax", a covert operation aimed at the overthrow of of Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The popularly elected and non-aligned Mosaddegh had been a Middle Eastern nemesis of Britan since nationalizing the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. Winston Churchill told the United States that Mosaddegh was "increasingly turning towards communism." The pro-Western Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, assumed control as an autocratic monarch. The shah's policies included the banning of the communist Tudeh Party and general suppression of political dissent by SAVAK, the shah's domestic security and intelligence agency. In Guatemala, a CIA-backed military coup ousted the left-wing President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in 1954. The post-Arbenz government -- a military junta headed by Carlos Castillo Armas -- repealed a progressive land reform law, returned nationalized property belonging to the United Fruit Company, set up a National Committee Defense Against Communism, and decreed a Prevenitive Penal Law Against Communism at the request of the United States. The non-aligned Indonesian government of Sukarno was faced with a major threat to its legitimacy beginning in 1956, when several regional commanders began to demand autonomy from Jakarta. After mediation failed, Sukarno took action to remove the dissident commanders. In February 1958, dissident military commanders in Central Sumatera (Col. Ahmad Hussein) and North Sulawesi (Col. Ventje Sumual) declared the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia-Permesta Movement aimed at overthrowing Sukarno regime. They were joined by many civilian politicians from from the Masyumi Party, such as Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, who were opposed to the growing influence of the communist Partai Komunis Indonesia party. Due to their anti-communist rhetoric, the rebels received arms, funding, and other covert aid from the CIA until Allen Lawrence Pope, an American pilot, was shot down after a bombing raid on government-held city of Ambon in April 1958. The central government responded by launching airborne and seaborn invasions of rebel strongholds Padang and Mandano. By the end of 1958, the rebels were militarily defeated, and the last remaining rebel guerilla bands surrendered by August 1961. In Iraq, Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in 1958, establishing an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Although the anti-communist Ba'ath Party was the pedominant faction in Qasim's cabinet, the US began to fear that the revolt might inspire a "chain reaction" throughout the Middle East. While Egypt and Syria attempted to assassinate Qasim for their own reasons, the CIA also considered sending him a poisoned handkerchief (it remains unclear if this contingency was implemented). After a series of coups, Ba'athists seized the presidency of the politically unstable country in 1968, with possible KGB support, although the Iraqi military carried out the coup. In the Republic of the Congo, newly independent from Belgium since June 1960, the CIA-cultivated President Joseph Kasa-Vubu ordered the dismissal of the democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and the Lumumba cabinet in September; Lumumba called for Kasa-Vumbu's dismissal instead. In the ensuring Congo Crisis, the CIA-backed Colonel Mobutu quickly mobilized his forces to seize power through a military coup d'etat. In British Guiana, the leftist People's Progressive Party (PPP) candidate Chedi Jagan won the position of chief minister in a colonially administered election in 1953, but was quickly forced to resign from power after Britan's suspension of the still-dependent nation's constitution . Embarrassed by the landslide electoral victory of Jagan's allegedly Marxist party, the British imprisoned the PPP's leadership and maneuvered the organization into a divisive rupture in 1955, engineering a split between Jagan and his PPP colleagues. Jagan again won the colonial elections in 1957 and 1961; despite Britan's shift to reconsideration of its view of the left-wing Jagan as a Soviet-style communist at this time, the United States pressured the British to withhold Guyana's independence until an alternative to Jagan could be identified, supported, and brought into office. Worn down by communist guerrilla war for Vietnamese independence and handed a watershed defeat by communist Vietminh rebels at the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the french accepted a negotiated abandonment of their colonial stake in Vietnam. In the Geneva Conference, peace accords were signed, leaving Vietnam devided between a pro-Soviet administration in North Vietnam and pro-Western administration in South Vietnam at the 17th parallel north. Between 1954 and 1961, Eisenhower's United States sent economic aid and military advisors to strengthen South Vietnam's pro-Western regime against communist efforts to destabilize it. Many emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America rejected the pressure to choose sides in the East-West competition. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War. the consensus reached at Bandung culminated with the creation of the Belgrade-headquartered Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Meanwhile, Khrushchev broadened Moscow's policy to establish ties with India and other key neutral states. Independence movements in the Thrid World transformed the post-war order into a more pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism in Asia and Latin America. The period after 1956 was marked by serious setbacks for the Soviet Union, most notably the breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, beginning te "Sino-Soviet split". Mao had defended Stalin whenever Khrushchev attacked him after his death in 1956, and treated the new Soviet leader as a superficial upstart, accusing him of having lost his revolutionary edge. For his part, Khrushchev, disturbed by Mao's glib attitude toward nuclear war, referring to the Chinese leader as a "lunatic on a throne". After this, Khrushchev made many desperate attempts to reconstitute the Sino-Soviet alliance, but Mao considered it useless and denied any proposal. The Chinese-Soviet animosity spilled out in an intra-communist propaganda war. Further on, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement. On the nuclear weapons front, the United States and the USSR pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with witch they could strike the teritory of the other. In August 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the worlds first Intercontinental Ballistic Missle (ICBM) and in October, lauched the first Earth satellite, Sputnik 1. The launch of Sputnik inaugurated the Space Race. This culminated in the Apollo Moon Landings, which astronaut Frank Borman later described as "just a battle in the Cold War". In Cuba, the July 26 Movement seized power in January 1959, toppling President Fulgencio Batista, whose unpopular regime had been denied arms by the Eisenhower administration. Diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States continued for some time after Batista's fall, but President Eisenhower deliberately left the capital to avoid meeting Cuba's young revolutionary leader Fidel Castro during the latter's trip to Washington in April; leaving Vice President Richard Nixon to conduct the meeting in his place. Eisenhower's officials were not sure as to whether Castro was communist, but hostile toward Cuban's efforts to decrease their economic reliance on the United States. Cuba began negotiating arms purchases from Eastern Europe in March 1960. In January 1961, just prior to leaving office, Eisenhower formally severed relations with the Cuban government. In April 1961, the administration of newly elected American President John F. Kennedy mounted an unsuccessful CIA-organized ship-borne invasion of the island of Playa Giron and Playa Larga in the Las Villas Province -- a failure that publicly humiliated the United States. Castro responded by embracing Marxism-Leninism, and the Soviet Union pleged to provide further support. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 was the last major incident in the Cold War regarding the status of Berlin and post-World War II Germany. By the 1950s, the approach to restricting emigration movement was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc. However, hundreds of thousands of East Germans annually emigrated to West Germany through a "loophole" in the system that exsisted between East and West Berlin, where the four occupying World War II powers governed movement. The emigration resulted in a massive "brain drain" form East Germany to West Germany of younger educated professionals, such that nearly 20% of East Germany's population had migrated to West Germany by 1961. That June, the Soviet Union issued a new ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of Allied forces from West Berlin. As in the past, the request was rebuffed by the West, and on August 13, East Germany erected a barbed-wire barrier that would eventually be expanded through construction into the "Berlin Wall", effectively closing the loophole. Continuing to seek ways to oust Castro following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Kennedy and his administration experimented with various ways of covertly facilitating the overthrow of the Cuban government. Significant hopes were pinned on a covert program named the Cuban Project, devised under the Kennedy administration in 1961. In February 1962, Khrushchev learned of the American plans regarding Cuba: a "Cuban project" -- approved by the CIA and stipulating the overthrow of the Cuban government in October, possibly involving the US military -- and yet one more Kennedy-ordered operation to assassinate Castro. Preperations to install Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba undertaken in response. Alarmed, Kennedy considered various reactions, and ultimately responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade and presented an ultimatum to the Soviets. Khrushchev backed down from a confrontation, and the Soviets removed the missiles in return for an American plege to not invade Cuba again. The Cuban Missile Crisis (October - November 1962) brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before. It further demonstrated the concept of "Mutually Assured Destruction", that neither superpower was really prepared to use their nuclear weapons, fearing the total global destruction via mutual retaliation. The aftermath of the crisis led to the first efforts in the Nuclear arms race at nuclear disarmament and improving relations, although the Cold War's first arms control agreement, the "Atlantic Treaty" had come into force in 1961. In 1964, Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues managed to oust him, but allowed him a peaceful retirement. Accused of rudeness and incompetence, he was also credited with ruining Soviet agriculture and bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Khrushchev had become an international embarrassment when he authorized construction of the Berlin Wall, a public humilliation for Marxism-Leninism. Confrontation through detente (1962-1979) In the course of the 1960s and 1970s, Cold War participants struggled to adjust to a new, more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer divided into two clearly opposed blocs. From the beginning of the post-war period, Western Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and 1960s, with per capita GDPs approaching those of the United States, while Eastern Bloc economies stagnated. As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, combined with the growing influence of the Third World alignments such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Non-Aligned Movement, less-powerful countries had more room to assert their independence and often showed themselves resistant to pressure from either superpower. Meanwhile, Moscow was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with the Soviet Union's deep-seated domestic economic problems. During this period, Soviet leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin embraced the notion of detente. The unity of NATO was breached early in its history, with a crisis occuring during Charles de Gaulle's presidency of France from 1956 onwards. De Gaulle protest at the United States' strong role in the organization and what he preceived as a "Special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom. In a memorandum sent to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan on September 17, 1958, he argued for the creation of a tripartite directorate that would put France on equal footing with the United States and the United Kingdom, and also for the expansion of NATO's coverage to include geographical areas of interest to France, most notably French Algeria, where France was waging a counter-insurgency and sought NATO assistance. Considering the response given to be unsatisfactory, de Gaulle began the development of an independent French nuclear deterrent (Force de Frappe or Strike Force) and in 1966 withdrew from NATO's military structures and expelled NATO troops from French soil. In 1968, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia called the "Prague Spring" took place that included "Action Program" of liberalizations, which described increased freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom movement, along with an economic emphasis on consumer goods, the possibility of a multiparty government, limiting the power of the secret police and potentially withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact. In answer to the Prague Spring, the Soviet army, together with most of its Warsaw Pact allies, invaded Czecholovakia. The invasion was followed by another wave of emigration, including an estimated 70,000 Czechs and Slovaks initially fleeing, with the total eventually reaching 300,000. The invasion sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania and China, and from Western European communist parties. In September 1968, during a speech at the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers Party one month after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev outlined the "Brezhnev Doctrine", in which he claimed the right to violate the sovereignty of any country attempting to replace Marxism-Leninism with Capitalism. During the speech, Brezhnev stated: When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries. The doctrine found its origins in the failures of Marxism-Leninism in states like Poland, Hungary and East Germany, which were facing a declining standard of living contrasting with the prosperity of West Germany and the rest of Western Europe. In late April 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson landed some 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic for a one-year occuation of the republic in an invasion codenamed Operation Power Pack, citing the threat of the emergence of a Cuban-style revolution in Latin America. Presidential elections held in 1966, during the occupation, handed the victory to the conservative Joaquin Balaguer. Although Balaguer enjoyed a real base of support from sectors of the elites as well as peasants, his formally running Dominican Revolutionary Party (RPD) opponent, former President Juan Bosch, did not actively campaign. The PRD's activist were violently harassed by the Dominican police and armed forces. In indonesia, the hardlined anti-communist Gen. Suharto wrested control of the state from his predecessor Sukarno in an attempt to establish a "New Order". From 1965 to 1966, the military led mass slaughter of an estimated half-million members and sympathizers of the Indonesian Communist Party and other leftist organizations. Escalating the scale of American intervention on the ongoing conflict between Ngo Dinh Diem's South Vietnamese government and the communist National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) insurgents opposing it, Johnson stationed some 575,000 troops in Southeast Asia to defeat the NLF and their North Vietnamese allies in the Vietnam War, but his costly policy weakened the US economy and, by 1975, cultimated in what most of the world saw as a humiliating defeat of the world's most powerful superpower at the hands of one of the world's poorest nations. North Vietnam recieved Soviet approval for its war effort in 1959; the Soviet Union sent 15,000 military advisors and anual arms shipments worth $450 million to North Vietnam, during the war, while the People's Republic of China sent 320,000 troops and annual arms shipments worth $180 million. In Chile, the Socialist candidate Salvador Allende won the presidential election in 1970, becoming the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a country in the Americas. The CIA targeted Allende for removal and operated to undermind his support domestically, which contributed to a period of unrest culminating in Gen. Augusto Pinochet's coup d'etat on September 11, 1973. Pinochet consolidated power as a military dictator, Allende's reforms of the economy were rolled bcak, and leftist opponents were killed or detained in the internment camps under the Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). Additionally, the continent-wide South American "Operation Condor" -- employed by dictators in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay to suppress leftist dissent -- was backed by the United States, which (sometimes accurately) perceived Soviet of Cuban support behind these opposition movements. Displeasing the United States, Jamaica began pursuing closer relations with the Cuban government as a result of Michael Manley's election in 1972. The United States' covert response included financing Manley's political opponents, the instigation of mutiny in the Jamaican army, and the fitting out of a private mercenary army against the Manley government. Violence ensured. Moreover, the Middle East continued to be a source of contention. Egypt, which received the bulk of its arms and economic assistance from the USSR, was troublesome client, with a reluctant Soviet Union feeling obliged to assist in both the 1967 Six-Day War (with advisors and technicians) and the War of Attrition (with pilots and aircraft) against pro-Western Israel. Despite the beginning of an Egyptian shift from a pro-Soviet to a pro-American orientation in 1972 (under Egypt's new leader Anwar El Sadat), rumors of imminent Soviet intervention on the Egyptians' behalf durring the 1973 Yom Kippur war brought about a massive American mobilization that threatened to wreck detente. Although, pre-Sadat Egypt had been the largest recipient of Soviet aid in the Middle East, the Soviets were also successful in establishing close relations with communist South Yemen, as well as the nationalist governments of Algeria and Iraq. Indirect Soviet assistance to the Palestinian side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict included support for Yassar Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). From 1973 to 1975, the CIA colluded with the Iranian government to finance and arm Kurdish rebels in the Second Kurdish-Iraqi War to weaken Iraq's Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. When Iraq and Iran signed Algiers Agreement in 1975, the support ceased. In East Africa, Somali army officers led Mohamed Siad Barre carried out a bloodless coup in 1969, creating the socialist Somali Democratic Republic. The Soviet Union vowed to support Somalia. Four years later, the pro-American Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown in a 1974 coup by the Derg, a radical group of Ethiopian army officers led by pro-Soviet Mengistu Haile Mariam, who built up relations with the Cubans and Soviets. When fighting between the Somalis and Ethiopians broke out in 1977-1978 Ethiopian-Somali War, Barre lost his Soviet support and turned to the Safari Club -- a group of pro-American intelligence agencies including Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia -- for support and weapons. The Ethiopian army military was supported by Cuban soldiers along with Soviet military advisors and armaments. US President Jimmy E. Carter remained mostly neutral during the conflict, insisting that Somalia was violating Ethiopian sovereignty. Carter initiated military cooperation with Somalia in 1980. The 1974 Portuguese Carnation Revolution against against the authoritarian Estado Novo returned Portugal to a muti-party system and facilitated the independence of the Portuguese colonies of Angola and East Timor. In Southwest Africa, where Angolan rebels had waged a multi-faction independence war against Portuguese rule since 1961, a two decade civil war replaced the anti-colonial struggle as fighting erupted between the communist People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), backed by the Cubans and Soviets, and the National Liberation Font of Angola (FNLA), backed by the United States, the People's Republic of China, and Mobutu's government in Zaire. The United States, the Apartheid government of South Africa, and several other African governments also supported a third faction, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Without bothering to consult the Soviets in advance, the Cuban government sent its troops to fight alongside the MPLA. Apartheid South Africa sent troops to support the UNITA, but the MPLA, bolstered by Cuban personnel and Soviet assistance, eventually gained the upper hand. In Southeast Asia, the colony of East Timor unilaterally declared independence under the left-wing Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) in November 1975. Supported by Australia and the United States, Suharto's Indonesia invaded that December -- the beginning of an occupation that would last a quarter-century. During the Vietnam War, North Vietnam invaded and occupied parts of Cambodia to use as military bases, which also contributed to the violence of the Cambodian civil war between the pro-American government of Lon Nol and Maoist Khmer Rouge insurgents. Documents incovered from the Soviet archives revealed that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the request of the Khmer Rouge after negotiations with Nuon Chea failed. US and South Vietnamese forces responded to these actions with a bombing campaign and ground incursion, the effects of which are disputed by historians. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge eventually massacre 1-3 million Cambodians in the killing fields, out of a population of only 8.4 million. Martin Shaw described these atrocities as "the purest genocide of the Cold War era." Vietnam deposed of Pol Pot in 1979 and installed Khmer Rouge defector Heng Samrin, only to be bogged down in a guerilla war and suffer a punitive Chinese attack. As a result of the Sino-Soviet splt, tensions along the Chinese-Soviet border reached their peak in 1969, and United States President Richard Nixon decided to use the conflict to shift the ballance of power towards the West in the Cold War. the Chinese had sought improved relations with the Americans in order to gain advantage over the Soviets as well. In February 1972, Nixon announced a stunning re-approachement with Mao's China by travelling to Beijing and meeting with Mao Zendong and Zhou Enlai. At this time, the USSR achieved rough nuclear parity with the United States; meanwhile, the Vietnam War both weakened America's influence in the Third World and cooled relations with Western Europe. Although indirect conflict between the Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions were beginning to ease. Following his China visit, Nixon met with Soviet leaders, including Brezhnev in Moscow. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks resulted in two landmark arms control treaties: SALT I, the first comprehensive limitation pact signed by the two superpowers, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT), which banned the development of systems designed to intercept incoming missile warheads. These aimed to limit the development of costly anti-ballistic missiles and nuclear missiles. Both Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of "peaceful coexistance" and established the goundbreaking new policy of detente (or cooperation) between the two superpowers. Meanwhile, Brezhnev attempted to revive the Soviet economy, which was declining in part beacause of the heavy military expenditures made in the past years. Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties, including agreements for increased trade. As a result of their meetings, detente would replace the hostility of the Cold War and the two countries would live mutually. Meanwhile, these developments coincided with "Ostpolitik" of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Other agreements were concluded to help further stabilize the situation in Europe, culminating in the Helsinki Accords signed at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975. In the 1970s, the KGB, led by Yuri Andropov, continued to persecute distinguished Soviet pesonalities such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, who were criticising the Soviet leadership in harsh terms. Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued through this period detente in the Thrid World, particularly during political crises in the Middle East, Chile, Ethiopia, and Angola. Although President Jimmy Carter tried to place another limit on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979, his efforts were underminded by other events that year, including the Iranian Revolution and the KGB-backed Nicaraguan Revolution, which both ousted pro-US regimes, and his retaliation against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan that December. "Second Cold War" (1979-1985) The term second Cold War refers to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions and conflicts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tensions greatly increased between the major powers with both sides becoming more militaristic. Diggins says, "Reagan went all out to fight the second cold war, by supporting counterinsurgencies in the third world". Cox says, "The intensity of this 'Second' Cold War was as great as its duration was short. In April 1978, the communist People's Democratic Republic of Aghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in the Saur Revolution. Within months, opponents of the communist government launched an uprising in eastern Afghanistan that qucikly expanded into a Civil War waged by guerrilla fighters called the Mujahideen against government forces countrywide. The Pakistani government provided these rebels with covert training centers, while the Soviet Union sent thousands of military advisors to support the PDPA government. Meanwhile, increasing friction between the compeeting factions of the PDPA -- the dominant Khalq and the more moderate Parcham -- resulted in the dismissal of Parchami cabinet members and the arrest of Parchami military officers under the pretext of a Parchami coup. By mid-1979, the United States had started a covert program to assist the mujahideen. In September 1979, Khalqist President Nur Muhammad Taraki was assassinated in a coup within the PDPA orchestrated by fellow Khalq member Hafizullah Amin, who assumed the presidency. Distrusted by the Soviets, Amin was assassinated by Soviet special forces (Spetsnaz) in December 1979. A Soviet-organized government, led by Parcham's Babrak Karmal but inclusive of both factions, filled the vacum. Soviet troops were deployed to stabilize Afghanistan under Karmal in more substantial numbers, although the Soviet government did not expect to do most of the fighting in Afghanistan. As a result, however, the Soviets were now involved in what had been a domestic war in Afghanistan. Carter responded to the Soviet intervention by withdrawing the SALT II treaty from the US Senate, imposing embargoes on grain and technology shipments to the USSR, and demanding a significant increase in military spending, and further announced that the United States would boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. He described the Soviet incursion as "the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War. In January 1977, four years prior to becoming president, Ronald Reagan bluntly stated, in a conversation with Richard V. Allen, his basic expectation in relation to the Cold War. "My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic," he said. "It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?" In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere. Both Reagan and the newly elected British Prime Minister Margeret Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union and its ideology. Reagan labeld the Soviet Union as an "Evil empire" and predicted that Communism would be left on the "ash heap of history". By early 1985, Reagan's anti-communist position had developed into a stance known as the new "Reagan Doctrine" -- which, in addition to containment, formulated an additional right to subvert exsisting communist governments. Besides continuing Carter's policy of supporting the islamic opponents of the Soviet Union and the Soviet-backed PDPA government in Afghanistan, the CIA also sought to weaken the Soviet Union itself by promoting political islam in the majority-Muslim Soviet Central Asia. Additionally, the CIA encouraged anti-communist Pakistan's ISI to train Muslims from around the world to participate in the jihad against the Soviet Union. Pope John Paul II provided a moral focus for anti-communism; a visit to his native Poland in 1979 stimulated a religious and nationalist resurgence centered on the Solidarity movement that galvanized opposition and may have played a part in his attempted assassination in 1981. In December 1981, Poland's Wojciech Jaruzelski reacted to the crisis by imposing a two year long period of Martial Law. Reagan imposed economic sanctions on Poland in response. Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin's top ideologist, advised Soviet leaders not to intervene if Poland fell under the control of Solidarity, for fear it might lead to heavy economic sanctions, representing a catastrophe for the Soviet economy. Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as 25% of the Soviet Unions gross national product at the expense of consumer goods and investment in civilian sectors. Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments both caused and exacerbated deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which saw at least a decade of economic stagnation during the late Brezhnev years. Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interest of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges. The Soviet Armed Forces became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their Military-industrial complex. However, the quanitive advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern Bloc dramatically lagged behind the West. By the early 1980s, the USSR had built up a military arsenal and army surpassing that of the United States. Soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, president Carter began massively building up the United States military. This buildup was accelerated by the Reagan administration, which increased the military spending from 5.3% of GNP in 1981 to 6.5% in 1986, the largest peacetime defense buildup in United States history. Tensions continued intensifying in the early 1980s when Reagan revived the B-1 Lancer program that was canceled by the Carter administration, produced LGM-118 Peacekeepers, installed US cruise missiles in Europe, and announced his experimental Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by the media, a defense program to shoot down missiles in mid-flight. With the background of a buildup in tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the deployment of Soviet RSD-10 Pioneer balistic missiles targeting Western Europe, NATO decided, under impetus of the Carter presidency, to deploy the new MGM-31 Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, primarily West Germany. This deployment would have placed missiles just 10 minutes striking distance from Moscow. After Reagan's military buildup, the Soviet Union did not respond by further building its military beacause the enormous military expenses, along with inefficient planned manufacturing and collectivized agriculture, were already a heavy burden for the Soviet economy. At the same time, Saudi Arabia increased oil production, even as other non-OPEC nations were increasing production. These developments contributed to the 1980s oil glut, which affected the Soviet Union, as oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues. Issues with command economics, oil prices decreased and large military expenditures gradually brought the Soviet economy into stagnation. On September 1, 1983, a single Soviet Air Force Su-15TM, accompanied by a MiG-23 and two other Su-15s shot down Korean Arilines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 passangers aboard, including sitting American Congressman Larry MacDonald, when the plane violated Soviet airspace just pass the west coast of Sakhalin Island near Moneron Island off the Russian east coast -- an act which Reagan characterized as a "massacre". This act increased support for military deployment, overseen by Reagan, which stood in place until the later accords between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The "Able Archer 83 exercise" in November 1983, a realistic simulation of coordinated NATO nuclear release, has been called the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the Soviet leadership keeping close watch on it considered a nuclear attack to be imminent. US domestic public concerns about intervening if foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War. The Reagan administration emphasized the use quick, low-cost counter-insurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts. In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the mutisided Lebanese Civil War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya and backed the Central American Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua. While Reagan's interventions in Grenada and Libya were popular in the United States, his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy. Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions. Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by the US and other countries, waged a fierce resistance against the invasion. The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its pupet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets Vietnam". However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans beacause the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system. A senior US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, siting that the invasion resulted in part from a "domestic crisis within the Soviet system. ... It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has ... caught up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself. We could be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay. Final years (1985-1991) By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the CCCP in 1985, the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the 1980s. These issues prompted Gorbachev to investigate measures to revive the ailing state economy. An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform called "Perestroika", or restructuring. Perestroika relaxed the production quota system, allowed private ownership of businesses and paved the way foreign investment. These measures were intended to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more productive areas in the private and civilian sectors. Despite some initial skepticism in the West, the new Soviet leader proved to be commited to reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic condition instead of continuing the arms race with the West. Partly as a way to fight off internal opposition from party cliques to his reforms, Gorbachev simultaneously introduced "Glasnost", or openness, which increased freedom of the press and the transparency of state run institutions. Glasnost was intended to reduce the corruption at the top of the Russian Communist Party and moderate the abuse of power in the Central Committee. Glasnost also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and the Western world, particularly with the United States, contributing to the accelerating detente between the two nations. In response to the Kremlin's military and political concessions, Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race. The first was held in 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland. At one stage the two men, accompanied only by an interpreter, agreed in principal to reduce each country's nuclear arsenal by 50%. A second Reykjavik Summit was held in Iceland. Talks went well until the focus shifted to Reagan's proposed "Strategic Defense Initiative", which Gorbachev wanted eliminated. Reagan refused. The negotiations failed, but the third summit in 1987 led to a breakthrough with the signing of the "Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty" (INF). The INF treaty eliminated all nuclear-armed, ground launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 300 miles to 3,400 miles and their infrastructure. East-West tensions rapidly subsided to the mid-to-late 1980s, culminating with the final summit in Moscow in 1989, when Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush signed the START I arms control treaty. During the following year it became apparent to the Soviets that the oil and gas subsidies, along with the cost of maintaining massive troop levels, represented a substantial economic drain. in addition, the security advantages of a buffer zone was recognised as irrelevant and the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states in Eastern Europe. In February 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan and by October 1990 Gorbachev consented to German reunification, the only alternative being a Tianamen secnario. When the Berlin Wall finally came down, Gorbachev's "Common European Home" concept began to take shape. On December 3, 1989, Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush declared an end to the 45 years of Hot/Cold relations between the two rivals at the Malta Summit, a year later, the US, UK and the USSR (for the first time since WWII) were partners in the Gulf War against Iraq. By 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapsed, and, deprived of Soviet military support, the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were starting to lose power. Grassroots organizations, such as Poland's Solidarity movement, rapidly gained ground with strong popular bases. In 1989, the Communist governments in Poland and Hungary became the first to negotiate the organizing of competitive elections. In Czechoslovakia and East Germany, mass protest unseated entrenched Communist leaders. The Communist regimes in Bulgaria and Romania also crumbled, in the later case as the result of a violent uprising. Attitudes had changed enough that the US Secretary of State James Baker suggested that the American government would not be opposed to Soviet intervention in Romania, on behalf of the opposition to prevent bloodshed. The tidal wave of change culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which symbolized the collapse of European Communist governments and graphically ended the Iron Curtain divide of Europe. the 1989 revolutionary wave swept across Central and Eastern Europe peacefully overthrew all of the Soviet-style communist states: East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, Romania was the only Eastern-bloc country to topple its communist regime violently and execute its head of state. In the USSR itself, glasnost weakened the bonds that held the Soviet Union together and by February 1990, with the complete dissolution of the USSR looming, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was forced to surrender its 73-year long monopoly on state power. At the same time freedom of press and dissent allowed by glasnost and the lingering "nationalities question" increasingly led the Unions component republics to declare their autonomy from Moscow, with the Baltic states withdrawing from the Union entirely. Gorbachev's permissive attitude toward Eastern Europe did not initially extend to Soviet territory; even Bush, who strove to maintain friendly relations, condemned the January 1991 massacres in Latvia and Lithuania by Soviet forces attempting to force the last few remaining SSR's to stay in the Union, and privately warning that economic ties would be frozen if violence continued. The USSR was fatally weakened by the failed 1991 August Coup that was carried out by Soviet hardliners who felt that Gorbachev's reforms had gone too far, and was forcing Russia play second fiddle to the United States, along with a growing number of Soviet republics, including Russia itself, who threaten to secede from the USSR. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), established on December 21, 1991, and came into effect on May 15, 1992 is viewed as a successor entity to the Soviet Union but, according to Russia's leaders, its purpose was to "allow a civilized divorce" between the Soviet Republics and is comparable to a loose Confederation, similar to that of the European Union. The USSR was officially dissolved on December 25, 1991, and Mikhail Gorbachev resigning from his position, with all of its government and military duties being transfered to the Russian Federation, and 1st Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The final vestiges of the old Soviet command structure were fully dissolved in June 1993. Aftermath Following the Cold War, The Russian Federation cut military spending dramatically. Restructuring of the economy left millions throughout the former Soviet Union unemployed. The capitalist reforms culminated in a recession more severe than the US and Germany had experienced during the Great Depression. The aftermath of the Cold War continues to influence affairs. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War world is widely considered as Unipolar, with the United States as the sole remaining superpower. The Cold War defined the political role of the United States in the post-World War II world: by 1989 the US held military alliances with 50 countries, and had 526,000 troops posted abroad in dozens of countries, with 326,000 stationed in Europe (two-thirds of which in West Germany) and about 130,000 in Asia (mainly in Japan and South Korea) The Cold War also marked the apex of peacetime military-industrial complexes, through their origins may by found as early as the 19th century, have grown considerably during the Cold War. The military-industrial complexes have great impact on their countries and help shape their society, policy and foreign relations. Military expenditures by the US during the Cold War years were estimated to have been $8 trillion, while nearly 100,000 Americans lost their lives in the Korean and Vietnam War's. Although the loss of life among Soviet soldiers is difficult to estimate, as a share of their gross national product the financial cost for the Soviet Union was far higher than that incurred by the United States. In addition to the loss of life among uniformed soldiers, millions died in the superpowers proxy wars around the globe, most notably in Southeast Asia. Most of the proxy wars and subsidies for local conflicts ended along with the Cold War; interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, as well as refugee and displaced persons crises have declined sharply in the post-Cold War years. The aftermath of Cold War conflict, however, is not always easily erased, as many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain accute. The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. In Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and an increase in the number of liberal democracies, while parts of the world, such as Afghanistan and Somalia were independence was accompanied by complete state failure. Historiography As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to post-war tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict has been a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and journalist. In particular, historians have simply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of US-USSR relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided. Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides. Although explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism", and "post-revisionism". "Orthodox" accounts place responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe. "Revisionist" writers place more responsibility for the breakdown of post-war peace on the United States, citing a range of US efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II. "Post-revisionist" see the events of the Cold War as more nuanced, and attempt to be more balanced in determining what occurred during the Cold War. Much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories. Relevance Cold War related themes, ranging from nationalism and anticommunism, to criticism of "the youth" in general and concern over the influence of pacifist philosophy, liberal politics, and alternative lifestyles in particular, held sway over local, state, and federal politics til well past the time of German reunification. As just a very minor example, video game streaming had been going on in vidyashorts for as long as anyone could remember, having been introduced before the Great War. But shitposting, an activity which only started to exist in about 1965 or so, was never officially tolerated in public there until the creation of shortstop. In certain periods during and after the Cold War, the vast influence of American Popular and Politial culture, also had a profound impact on Europe and in Asian countries; notably like Britan, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia and others. Many of them, choosing to drop their "old world" colonial tradition style of living and become more "American" like, as democracy slowly began to take hold. For example, the advent of television in the US in the late 1940s and 1950s, and it's rise to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, became more of a global staple among world youth by 1990s and 2000s, and into today. See also * Stream Wars Category:Common history Category:Wars